


We Were Born this Way

by Freakazoid524



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Gen, Matt Murdock Needs a Hug
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-07
Updated: 2016-09-07
Packaged: 2018-08-13 18:58:50
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,679
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7982596
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Freakazoid524/pseuds/Freakazoid524
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The devil climbs out, reveling in a world Matt so desperately wants out of. The devil makes a home, curling up around his heart, barricading Matt from others. It tears him into two, the world suddenly too much and too little all at once. Screams of the dying, of the suffering, of the battered and bruised fill the night air, as he tries to sleep, as he does nothing but listen.</p>
            </blockquote>





	We Were Born this Way

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first daredevil fic, so here go, like it or don't I cannot seem to care. I've had this thing sitting on my laptop since the show came out, so I got some balls together finished it, and am now posting it. 
> 
> So yeah, this is it.

“We were born this way- forced to bleed out on dirty sidewalks, on lonely street corners. We were born this way- left to struggle our way to redemption, skin still tainted from the sins of our ancestors, left here to drag ourselves back to the light after over a lifetime of darkness engraved in our hearts by men we never knew. But don’t worry; we were born this way- forever trapped in a cycle of despair and loss with the devil clinging to our hearts.” –By Me one day when I was bitter and angry

The sun filtered in hitting his skin as if these golden rays of sunshine were more nail than invisible light. The sun filtered in, harsh rays casting down upon his skin like an iron brand, searing his flesh as if it were made to burn. His eye lashes fluttered against porcelain freckled cheeks like a paintbrush brushes against new paper, loud deafening beats as lash meeting flesh cause his ears to recoil, city life driving bullets into eardrums, he covers his ears. It doesn’t help. His tongues lays heavy, mouth parted slightly, unable to truly close, the air is sour and bitter, a mix of chemicals and pollution. His breathe reverberates through his being, echoing through his skull. He blinks, eyes reopening to darkness, to a vast void of emptiness. He blinks, hand hitting cool metal railings of a bedframe, the echoes painting a world thrown to the flames of hell, a world completely on fire. 

The backpack, on his shoulders, is heavy from books and schoolwork- books that tell a story all on their own. His footsteps bounce off barren walls. His shirt rubs raw on his skin; the cotton, built in Indian sweatshops, turns his stomach upside-down. He tries to breath in, chest heavy from the way the atmosphere seems to want to strangle him; the way oxygen, nitrogen, and fifty different molecules in the air shift and push against him; the way they brush his skin so lightly, so harshly that he’s left wandering how nobody else feels it too. He focuses on his father’s heartbeat, listening as it turns another corner, disappearing into the streets of New York City- he’s maybe three blocks away now, still walking, still heading away from him.

There’s something stirring. He feels different underneath, quietly it grows, every breath, every step, something stirs deep in his soul. He knows one day he won’t be able to control it, but for now, he’s comfortably numb, content with shoving it to the back of his mind. His grandmother used to say they, him and his father and those before them, had the devil in them. She would say it as if the devil could be cultivated, could be fostered from one generation to the next, handed down like a locket, made to keep the secrets of a past long since dead and gone. She said it as if it were carved into his very soul. She said it with a hollow voice, as if the devil her husband once fostered had turned on her itself, clawing out her soul and swallowing it whole.

Every day he sits at his desk, that something stirring deep in his soul, unsettled and anxious, pacing like a caged animal waiting to attack, for an opening to act. He pours himself into his schoolwork, hoping to bury the monsters of his dreams in equations and Marshall Thurgood. He pushes himself, staying up late for a father that he’s worn to the edges, for a man who has sacrificed everything for his son. He stays up late for the man who kept him, who never gave up on him. 

He keeps going as boys with low self-esteem and familial problems and evil hearts push him down, dig up the devil in his heart and let him cut loose. He keeps going when his father makes him promise never to fight anymore, to use his head, let his words turn into the real weapon. He keeps going when they beat him until his blood leaves a permanent stain on his lips, the hot roaring sound as it flows down his face- a call to action that he cannot go to. He keeps getting back up when they think he’ll never be able to again. He keeps going with a shut mouth when he hears his father making deals with mobsters to make a better life for him. He keeps going and going and going and going and going and going and going. 

He keeps-

BANG

 

A single gunshot tears through the night sky. The sharp tang of blood and death assault his senses, as he picks himself up, rushing to the door and out of his home. He pushes past the officers, finally feels the blood on his fingers, staining his skin more than chemicals ever could. It’s a hollow autopsy, slim bony fingers ghosting over a man he will always call dad, fingers finding bullet holes were flesh once made man whole, fingers gliding over his father’s face for the last time. 

The devil climbs out, reveling in a world Matt so desperately wants out of. The devil makes a home, curling up around his heart, barricading Matt from others. It tears him into two, the world suddenly too much and too little all at once. Screams of the dying, of the suffering, of the battered and bruised fill the night air, as he tries to sleep, as he does nothing but listen.  
\---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Years later, he does not walk home anymore. He does not walk back to the orphanage anymore. No, now he limps- legs heavy, right throbbing with this all-consuming thrum as the vibrations of foot to concrete reverberates up his leg; jolts of energy piercing through bones and digging up all the marrow from the inside out. He moves with concrete feet, legs filled with lead, every breath a battle, a battle whose only reward is more pain, more agony, more despair, every day was a fight to survive, his lone spirit clawing his way to the top of an invisible chain of enemies. He is choking on his own blood, sliding and clunking his way down long unending streets, as his own voice strangles himself inside out. He doesn’t want to speak, not to anyone, though there is only one person to talk to now, and it most certainly wasn’t the nuns. 

He just has to wait, wait life out until ultimately death finds him- finds him in back alleys, broken and bloody from a war he doesn’t even understand yet, from a war he has yet to truly fight. All his efforts, despite everything he moves to achieve, to fight for death is waiting. It doesn’t take a sage to know that, only a broad soul to understand it.  
Death is waiting, calling for him, at the end of the line.  
He tells himself that he’s not afraid of death, looks deep into his being and finds he’s really not, and maybe that’s what scares him the most. Maybe it terrifies him not that death is coming, but he almost welcomes those tendrils of the unknown, of the darkness clasping, grasping at his soul. He thrives on the hellfire that licks the underside of his skin like acid, reveling in the pain that sings deep within him.

Stick is brutal, he forces Matt down, forces him down on his knees, forces him down so his chin falls to his chest, keeps him there submissive like a dog at his mentor’s feet. He looks enthralled too, at the sight of Matt on his knees, looks all too pleased with himself.

The priest is brutal. He is also calm and sure and sometimes pleasant and sometimes sweet. He is also manipulative and confident. He tells Matt to strip that he needs it for something, Matt isn’t quite sure. Every time he asks for a reason, the answers are vague and do not quite make sense, they are clouded by what is right and what is wrong, blurred out by the fact that this is his priest, an adult, a man of god, and Matt needs to do what is asked of him. Matt has been taught to do what is asked of him, just like he is taught to be silent, to take bruises and broken bones with zipped up lips, and little complaint, just like Matt was taught to keep his head down and do his work, to not get involved in fights that were not his to step into.

So he strips, lets the stale air of the basement fall heavy of his bare chest, lets his senses go into overdrive, lets himself fall a little deeper to the spaces of his own mind. He pulls into himself, until the only thing he can hear is the sound of his own breathing, heavy and clenched, until all he can hear is the sound of his heart beating, of his blood rushing through his veins and arteries. He tries to fall deeper, as hands leaves new marks on his skin, as hands map out the expense of a foreign body.  
He strips and grapples in the dark for something he’s lost, finds the hole in his chest grows wider, thick arms curling around him like they own him. He thinks they own him now, thinks that maybe they always have in their own way.

When he strips again, he does it so that the little girl across the hall from him does not have to, he does it so that the four year old little girl he watches on Sunday afternoons does not have to, he does it so that she does have to, because he can give her that, can protect her from that. He does it because he has to know at least one person does not have to do that.

The third time he does it, it is because he does not want the boy a year older than him to do it, even though the kid kicks him into the ground every day after school, he shouldn’t go through it, so Matt strips, lets clothes give way, and lets his priest have his fun, keeps his mouth shut tight.

He takes it out on Stick, takes it out on a punching bag, takes it out in his training, lets the devil out just a little to quench the flames licking at his heart, and tries to focus on the sound of his own heart beating. He just wants to breathe.

He doesn’t breathe for years. Stick leaves and it just seems to get harder to function, Stick leaves, the priest leaves, the nuns come and go, kids get adopted, kids get foster homes, kids move on, and he just stays. He stays and stays and stays put just where they tell him to. He nods his head in all the right places and keeps going and until they tell him to. He keeps going until he’s eighteen and they tell him to go, they tell him he’s free. 

They tell him he’s not a part of the system anymore, so he leaves, goes straight to Columbia and doesn’t look back.

The night air is cools his heated skin, skin so searing that he almost swears he can hear his own flesh sizzling as it chills, little wafts of smoke puffing up from hellfire pores. Tonight is loud, the world crashing down on ears like pins poking straight into exposed nerves, every footstep is thunder booming, echoing through the thin walls of his head, every whisper is a shout to a friend across the room, and every siren is a nail scratching its way down a chalkboard. He tenses, muscles coiling up like a metal spring ready to leap up and away, like a caged animal ready to pounce. Even tonight the silk, usually soothing sheets, scrap against his skin like sandpaper, shaving him down to his core, raw and angry. He doesn’t sleep. Instead he lies awake, listening to nail racing across the chalkboard streets, listens as a woman slices her own flesh two blocks over, sharp razor making tally marks in her own skin; listens as a young man four blocks the other direction is brutally raped, as five different men make his body their home for the night; listens as a little girl sobs into her pillow, soft cries deafening out the world around him as her father slides his hands down her blouse, then lower and lower, soft nothings whispering into the night air. He listens as something else dies inside of him, as the devil eats up whatever sliver of humanity broke off into a thick meaty chunk for it to devour, feels the fever set in, a fever not even the night air can soothe. 

He moves, finds his feet and moves. He doesn’t remember coming to the gym only knows that one second he was standing, angry ragged breaths huffing past quivering lips in his dorm and the next he was furiously pounding on a punching bag that was way past saving on the ground. Blood coated his knuckles, sending a delicious tang to the air, and warming his bones. 

Later, when the devil whimpers back into the recesses of his mind, finally calms enough to be hampered back down into its resting place, and Matt can come back, he dials a number he’s not used in years, waits for someone to answer, before calling in his complaint, nearly begs for someone anyone to save that little girl. By the end of the week the devil is back, bitter and enraged by the lack of justice, by how easily injustice is tolerated in this world, how the law can do nothing to save a little girl from a lying father. He stalks the halls, finds words blurring together on pages he should have memorized by then, finds himself at the gym more times than he can count. 

He goes to the library seeking comfort, trying to find absolution, resolution, peace, something, anything. Instead he finds a call to action, and the end to a promise made long ago with the only man who’s ever cared enough to fight for him. Finds himself desecrating the last promise he ever made to the man he called father and for some reason he finds what he’s been looking for all long, a bridge between the devil and Matthew Murdock- a compromise between the blood thirsty and the martyr. “Throughout history, it has been the inaction of those who could have acted; the indifference of those who should have known better; the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most; that has made it possible for evil to triumph,” he reads that day, realizing that Haile Selassie is right. Despite his desires, despite what he wants, he cannot be selfish, cannot allow inaction to cloud the halls of justice. That night he finds that little girl’s father, puts him in a body cast and finally gets a good night’s rest. 

\------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This was just how he was. He was born this way, with the devil in his heart, with fire in his veins. He was born this way, searching for something he’ll never be able to reach. When the mask slides on the first time, he finds something he’s never quite known before. He sets it on his face and finds that he can breathe. He finds that he was born this way, a devil incarnated to man. 

He was born this way- forced to bleed out on dirty sidewalks, on lonely street corners. He was born this way- left to struggle his way to redemption, skin still tainted from the sins of his ancestors, left here to drag himself back to the light after over a lifetime of darkness engraved in his heart by men he’ll never knew. But don’t worry; he was born this way- forever trapped in a cycle of despair and loss with the devil clinging to his heart..

**Author's Note:**

> The struggles are real for Matt Murdock, everyone needs to know.


End file.
